Rhoda AI raised $450 million at a $1.7 billion valuation. The round backs a bet that internet video can train robots for factory work when conditions shift, a gap that has limited most industrial automation. Premji Invest led the financing. At $1.7 billion post-money, the raise ranks Rhoda among the better-capitalized bets on “physical AI.”
The startup is building a model trained on millions of publicly available videos, plus a smaller stream of robot telemetry. It aims to direct robots through industrial tasks even when setups look unfamiliar. Chief Executive Officer Jagdeep Singh, who previously ran QuantumScape, incubated Rhoda inside Khosla Ventures and says it plans to license the model. Khosla Ventures, Temasek and John Doerr also joined.
The gap between robotics in the lab and robotics in the real world has been one of the hardest unsolved problems in the industry. We’re excited to come out of stealth and show the research community how we’re tackling the issue.
— Rhoda AI (@rhoda_ai_) March 10, 2026
Bloomberg article in comment. pic.twitter.com/5WudybovbG
Most robotics models still learn from human teleoperation data. That pipeline produces clean demonstrations but in narrow settings, leaving systems brittle when camera angles, object orientation, or lighting changes on a line. Rhoda calls its approach a Direct Video Action system and says broad video exposure improves generalization. It said a test using off-the-shelf parts worked inside a leading automaker’s factory, and it plans to license the model to customers.
Singh says video training reduces edge-case failures in production. “In the case of teleoperation, if the phone orientation changes, that might be enough to cause the model to fail,” he said. Vinod Khosla argues the constraint is not demos but durability. “The real world is messy, complex, and working on production lines is much harder than doing the demo,” Khosla said.
Investors also see a service model forming around robots. Premji Invest’s Sandesh Patnam said robots-as-a-service could help US onshoring by letting clients rent hardware and software as needs change. Rhoda says it will build hardware, including humanoid robots, to collect more data and ensure performance. Next catalyst is whether early licensing converts this round into repeat deployments on production lines.
